Fourth Sunday in Advent

December has been flying by, as it always does, so here is the fourth poem, another serious one, but shorter.  This poem brought me up short, it has overtones of Sleeping Beauty, but a better happy ending.  As Joseph says to his brothers at the end of Genesis, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good", I find God's ability to bring good out of bad a great comfort.

The Wicked Fairy at the Manger
by U A Fanthorpe

My gift for the child:
No wife, kids, home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort –
The workshy, women, wimps,
Petty infringers of the law, persons
With notifiable diseases,
Poll tax collectors, tarts;
The bottom rung.
His end?
I think we’ll make it
Public, prolonged, painful.

Right, said the baby. That was roughly
What we had in mind.

Third Sunday in Advent

This Sunday I have chosen T S Eliot's Journey of the Magi, a vivid imaging of the long journey from the east.  To me there seems to be a reminder of the Exodus story, leaving one place to follow God and entering that trustful discomfort, looking back with longing, but knowing you have to go on.  There is a spiritual journey taking place alongside the physical journey and the poem leaves us in the "now but not yet" time in which we still live today, with God's kingdom being here, but not fully yet.

There is a recording of Eliot reading his own poem, which is magnificent and well worth a listen, I hope you enjoy it and that your Christmas preparations are going well.

Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Than at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different: this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Second Sunday in Advent

I discovered this poem last Christmas, in an Advent book called Haphazard by Starlight, which has a poem for every day of Advent and loved it.  It is another poem that connects the Christmas of long ago with now, but in a very different way, focusing instead on the hope that Christmas gives us.  Hope for the future, that Jesus will return and the hope we have in us now, a hope that cannot be counted in a census or understood by the powers of this world.

In the days of Caesar
By Waldo Williams, translated Rowan Williams

In the days of Caesar, when his subjects went to be reckoned,
there was a poem mad, too dark for him (naive with power)
      to read
It was a bunch of shepherds who discovered
in Bethlehem of Judah, the great music beyond reason and
      reckoning:
shepherds, the sort of folk who leave the ninety-nine behind
so as to bring the stray back home, dawning toward cock-crow,
the birthday of the Lamb of God, shepherd of mortals.

Well, little people, and my nation, can you see
The secret buried in you, that no Caesar ever captures in his lists?
Will not the shepherd come to fetch us in our desert,
Gathering us in to give us birth again, weaving us into one
In a song heard in the sky over Bethlehem?
He seeks us out as wordhoard for his workmanship, the laureate
     of heaven

First Sunday in Advent

This Advent I thought I would mark the Sundays of Advent by posting some of my favourite Christmas poems, one on each Sunday, although the odd poem may appear on other days as well.  I decided to start with an old favourite, Christmas by John Betjeman, which masterfully combines Christmas ancient and modern.  I was introduced to this poem when a couple of us read some of it at a prep school carol concert at the local church and have loved it ever since.

Christmas by John Betjeman

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain.
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that villagers can say
'The Church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

Provincial public houses blaze
And Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad,
And Christmas morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? and is it true?
The most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

Radio Recommendations

I listen to the radio a lot, a great deal more than I watch television and it is great to listen to while knitting.  My two staple radio choices are BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra.  I was practically raised on Radio 4 and I have listened to Radio 4 Extra, or BBC 7 as it then was, since its first night of broadcasting.  Even now I can remember sitting on a chair in the dining room sitting right by my dad's then very new digital radio, listening intently and rediscovering Hancock's Half Hour.  Therefore I thought it might be good to recommend a couple of the things I've enjoyed lately on the radio, as you can listen to the BBC radio player anywhere in the world, for free, what luxury!

Having said all that about Radios 4 and 4 Extra, I shall now make my first recommendation from Radio 3 (the BBC's classical music station): The John Wilson Orchestra Prom, Kiss Me Kate.  This orchestra specialises in mid 20th century musicals and associated music and their annual prom has become my favourite.  Although it may not be "high brow" music, it is full of joy, fun and done to an extraordinary standard, Kiss Me Kate swept me through a Sunday afternoon while I knitted the foot of a sock.  You have another three weeks or so to listen, then the filmed version will be on television at Christmas - I went and checked!

Next we definitely are going high brow, with T S Eliot's poem The Wasteland.  I recently bought a copy of his poems as part of an effort to get to know more poetry and I cannot say I understood it, indeed I still would not say I fully understood it, but listening to it has helped a bit.  In particular having two voices, Jeremy Irons and Dame Eileen Atkins, reading the poem helped to underline that it is not supposed to have a meaning as a whole.  By which I mean, it does not begin at point A and end at point B having been on a descriptive or narrative journey along the way, but that it creates its whole out of a series of impressions.  I found the best way to think of the poem was as a series of thoughts wandering through the poet's mind as he tried to make sense of the world after the First World War.  The reading is a delight in itself and I am pleased to see that it is still there for another three weeks so that I can have another crack at it, though I live in hope of a CD or download becoming available of this and Jeremy Irons' reading of Eliot's Four Quartets.

Staying with the First World War, the last recommendation for now is Home Front, an epic project Radio 4 have started this week, a drama with an episode set on this day one hundred years before.  The first two episodes have been very well produced, although they possibly need to watch their idiom, one or two expressions did not sit quite with the period and I already feel that I have learnt something more of the home front experience.

What are your favourites?

God of Contradictions

Something I wrote a week or two ago and have just polished up, mostly by getting the verses into order.  I suppose it is a Psalm?  Nothing on David's level though.

God of Contradictions

The God who made the earth the skies and sea
And allows us to trash them

The God who made man and woman in His own image
And allowed us to sin and break His heart

The God of beauty and perfection
Who allows ugliness and imperfection to reign

The God of justice, friend of the poor,
Who allows injustice and poverty to flourish

The God who is the prince of peace
And yet allows wars and rumours of wars

The God who sent His son
to save us in human form
And allowed us to beat and kill Him

The God who heals,
who makes the lame walk and the blind to see
And allows children to get sick and die

The God who is holy and perfect
And allows sinners to join Him at His table

The God of all joy
Who allows unimaginable sorrow

The God who collects our tears in a jar
And allows us to go on and on filling the jar

The God who hears our prayers
And so often allows silence to answer them

The God who rose again
And allows us to share in His hope

The God of contradictions
whom we so little understand
One day will you allow us to see as you see?
Will you seem so contradictory then?

The God who will soon return
And allows soon to feel like forever

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  1 Corinthians 13.12

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Someone had posted it in the comments section of a blog I read and I thought it was an absolutely awesome poem, so visual and tangible and so true. I simply had to repost it.

A few thoughts

First a poem:

Cat's Note
How often can you take a poem
and stroke it on your lap?

John Agard

Rather liked that, an amusing, intriguing little thought. The cat is of course, quite right, but then cats generally are right, they prefer it that way.

The major excitement in my life this week has been the opening of Waitrose in Croydon. For those not in the UK or not in the know this is a supermarket, generally seen as the "poshest", certainly it sells the best quality food and I am most excited and thrilled. I now have beautiful food for sale 10 minutes from my front door, I have a feeling this may make a slight dent in my finances. It is impressive how they have managed to make a formerly drab thoroughly depressing shop into a smart, classy little supermarket. It is the smallest Waitrose I've ever been in, but still stocks a good range of products. Their staff could do with a little more training, but no doubt that will come with time.

I've been a teeny bit less overwhelmingly exhausted today and no headache wooooooooo! Let's hope that continues tomorrow, I like being able to do something with my day, however small. Yet I'm starting to struggle with the heat, I'm beginning to conclude that my body simply does not have an optimum temperature, it is stuck in a permenant state of petulant disapproval and complaint, as hard to please as the Queen of Hearts in "Alice". Heigh-ho, can't get too fed up, or I'd never stop being fed up. Though sometimes that's how it feels. Yesterday I was so, so angry with feeling awful constantly, so sick of it, so fed up and yet there doesn't seem to be an end in sight, if nothing I get worse. I'm sure God knows what He's doing, it just all looks jolly odd from my perspective.